The Sea Hates a Coward (19 page)

On the monitors,
Tavuto
was in chaos. Claustrophobic battles raged in the ship’s underdeck, open combat sprawled across acres of open deck, and muzzle flashes set the last of the morning fog alight as cranes and turrets blasted away at each other.

One screen showed the docks; overseers were crowding the piers, shoving each other into the choppy water in their haste to pile aboard the last remaining cargo boats. At their backs, zombies were swarming onto the quays.

Another screen showed the Tartarean swelter of the trying sheds, where a dwindling platoon of overseers held the gantries over the rendering vats against an onslaught of the dead. As Wrack watched, a strapping corpse on the shed floor heaved on a rusted chain, joined by a dozen of his fellows even as bullets rattled into them. The chain came down and a huge vat tilted overhead, spilling tons of molten tallow onto the catwalk where the overseers were packed. Above their screams, the chain-puller’s triumphant cry of “fack off!” was unmistakable.

They watched as Osedax arrived in Dakuvanga’s control deck, the lift doors opening on his death squad like the lid on a tin of weaponised sardines. They made chillingly short work of clearing the place: most of the overseers had presumably gone down to defend the god-crane at its base, and only a skeleton crew remained. As Osedax began to cut the spine from a thrashing, downed overseer, Wrack looked away.

In one of the great barracks belowdecks, where the zombies were massed in steel pens between deployments, something like a rally was underway. Even as debris fell from the roof of the metal cavern, shaken free by the impacts of shells on the deck far above, the horde in the filthy pit raised their arms, chanting, squeezing their own hearts in their hands.

At the head of the chamber, borne aloft by a crowd, Once-Fat Man boomed through a loudhailer and jabbed his sagging arm at the vault’s bent, broken doors. The roar that rose from the new recruits drowned out the sounds from the other monitors, flattening the speakers’ output to a flat buzz as the army boiled from the depths.

Then a fusillade of deep cracking noises shook the bridge, and Wrack’s attention was snatched by a blossoming of fire on the feed from Dakuvanga. Realising the command centre was no longer under friendly control, the lagoon’s turrets, still held by the overseers, had switched their aim to the heart of the ship and had begun a fearsome artillery duel.

The floor shook as Dakuvanga’s own guns fired; on the monitor, Wrack watched as zombies, blackened and glistening with shrapnel, leapt into the control cradles of the crane’s defence mounts. Osedax survived the blast—a spar of metal had been driven through his abdomen, but he was still walking, his footsteps kissing the deck with gummy pools of hydraulic fluid.

Then another shell hit the crane tower, halfway up this time, and a moan that would have made even the Bahamut sound like a squeaking child shuddered through the ship. Another couple of shots like that, and Dakuvanga would fall.

But then, on a wall-sized map of the ship, a green light winked off at the prow, came back blinking crimson, and Mouana erupted into harsh, barking laughter.

“Look, look!” she cackled, shoving two corpses out of the way and diving on the controls for the main screen. As she wrestled with a dial, the monitor flickered through scenes of dismemberment, raging static, lenses caked red with blood or cracked into grey kaleidoscopes, then settled on a red-lit bunker. The last of its defenders were being dragged down under dead flesh; zombies were flocking to consoles and firing seats.

Wrack glanced over to the feed from the bridge’s summit, aimed down the length of the ship’s forward hull. Out past the trying sheds, the rows of cranes and the flensing yards, through the mist and the gunsmoke, a grey block began to swivel slowly on its fortress mount.

It was something from the ancient ship’s deep past: a relic too terrible to relinquish. A trophy from
Tavuto
’slife under another name, a flagship in some forgotten war. The turret’s hundred-yard horns swung round into profile, glinting in a shaft of weak sunlight, and Mouana shook Wrack’s shoulder in delight.

“Look, man! Look!” she cawed, and pointed back to the feed from the turret’s interior. There, settling herself into a tarnished throne at the heart of the ancient gun, was Kaba. Wrack rubbed his mangled jaw in wonder and empathy, not quite believing this was the same broken thing that had been bailing out a sinking pinnace with him just days before.

As the turning turret rumbled on its mount, and its interior began to glow with the demonic energies of its charging guns, a song began.
The
song. It came from Kaba’s smashed mouth first.

“I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea,” she piped from the gunmaster’s throne, with far too fine a voice to be coming from her rotting husk, and her crew answered. In a hundred voices and a dozen tongues, they joined together with the whine of the guns in the beautiful mess of the omnishanty, and the song took on a life of its own.

Another shot hammered into Dakuvanga’s foundations from the lagoon. The ship’s bridge rumbled as the structure shifted, man-thick cables snapping and ricocheting against the hull, but it was too late to stop what had begun.

Audible through the walls of the bridge, the twinned siegebreakers jutting from the bow turret sang with stored energy, the lights on their barrels glowing brighter than noon.

Then, as the turret crew reached a sustained peak, dead lungs quaking with the memories of their homes, Kaba yanked back the firing grip. The paired railguns, built to knock cities into surrender from miles offshore, coughed metal at a speed that made the air catch light, and obliterated the lagoon turrets.

For a moment, every light in the bridge winked off, every monitor flickered black, the radios were silenced, as the thunder of the guns echoed across the endless sea. Even the violence on the decks was stilled.

In the aching pause after impact, the
Tavuto
lurched. With a wobble that led every soul on the bridge to thoughts of sinking, the deck canted slightly to the side. A low, tortured sound rang through the deep fabric of the ship, and built to a shearing shriek. The sea crashed as if accepting the calving of an iceberg, and the ship righted itself with a shudder that sent the bridge crew sprawling.

The radios came back on first, and every channel was identical; a wall of rapturous noise from the dead. The monitors came back on soon after, as Mouana’s crew were struggling to their feet. The starboard deck cameras showed a ragged hole where the lagoon had been, waves leaping at the charred edges of the hull.

All over the rest of the ship, the dead ran riot. The overseers were in full rout. At the docks, escaping boats foundered as they were overloaded with corpses, while deck cameras showed desperate figures in flapping coats, pumping off their last shotgun rounds before disappearing under writhing bodies. At the flensing yards, a terrible fight was reaching its conclusion: squads of the dead, many of them in the livery of the Blades, were closing in on overseers huddled in the belly of a Benthocetus.

“We’ve won!” hissed Mouana, and Wrack winced. That was dangerous talk.

As if to underline his fears, the monitors flicked off again, switching to static for a long moment, before a coldwater-sharp image snapped onto the screens, dominating the entire bank. The transmission was of a woman’s face, leonine, sneering down at the camera from above the collar of a grey uniform. Headphones clamped the sides of her face below a pepper-grey crewcut, her eyes flicked to the side as her hands tapped at controls offscreen. Behind her, men and women in similar dress sat in crash-couches, fingers flicking over maps and machinery, silenced by the thudding drone of rotors.

Wrack started, blinking, as he processed the fact he was looking at a healthy human face. Too healthy: her skin was entirely ungrey, her nose sharp and whole. Veins traced ordinary patterns around her temples. Before she spoke, he knew they were fucked; after, he was certain.

“
Tavuto
, this is squadron Kentigern-Chi out of Lipos-tholos, responding to your distress call. Please answer our hails. We are registering railgun fire from your location, and presuming a serious national incursion on fishing grounds.”

The soldier thumbed a switch on her headset, spoke briefly on another channel with her eyes focused on something just out of shot, then returned to the transmission.

“I repeat, this is Kentigern-Chi: respond immediately. We are through the gate and closing in six, with or without confirmation status. We’ve five triremes and attendant carriers on a pattern four loadout; assault troops and destriers deploying as per threat condition Rho. Answer now or we will assume a boarding and configure for Sigma. Out.”

From the port windows of the bridge, purple lightning flashed, far away. Storms at the gate, massive discharges flaring as a huge mass passed through the gap between worlds. Wrack looked at Mouana and Mouana looked at Wrack, their faces lit in amethyst flashes, two children caught breaking into a boarded-up shop.

They had six minutes. Six minutes, and then the triremes of the city, the black oaken warships and their holds full of armoured killers, would be on them. Their only advantage was that the overseers, in their cowardice, had been too ashamed to mention they had been overcome by their workforce when they squirted their cry for help through the gate.

Wrack was just opening his mouth to tell Mouana how fucked they were when she twisted aside, grabbing for a radio and snarling for Kaba to respond from the bow turret. Once she had barked her instructions, she turned on her milling bridge crew, began ordering them onto their own radios, calling for readiness in every part of the war-quaked
Tavuto
.

He could do nothing but admire her pragmatism, her refusal to accept defeat, but the situation was ridiculous. Swinging his one remaining leg from the trolley with all the force he could muster, Wrack kicked his friend hard in the side and shouted for her to listen to him.

“Not now, Wrack,” she muttered, before turning to the map of the ship.

“No,” said Wrack, kicking her again. “I know—this is sherious. But you really need to lishen.” He nudged his sagging jaw with his good hand, trying to stop it ruining his consonants. The attention she gave Wrack then, undivided even as her crew bellowed for instructions, was as sincere a gesture of affection as she could have given him.

“I need you to raizhe Oshedax, in the crane,” he implored. “And I know you want to join your matesh,” he added, nodding to the crowd of Blades forming on the foredeck, “but I need you here. Pleazhe. Trushte me.”

“Fine,” said Mouana, with an expression that suggested he was testing the very limits her of trust, and set at the comms panel even as her radio crew called for her. Then there was a crackle of static, and Dakuvanga answered.

“Osedax,” came the voice from the other end, without a hint of congratulation. Clearly, there was no time for chat.

“Lishen,” said Wrack, then added, “well done and all,” as it was only fair. “Schity’s been alerted. Triremezh coming in. Five of them, and carrierzh.”

“Yep,” replied the gravelly voice, as if waiting to hear something that would surprise it.

“Kill ’em,” said Wrack, grinning. “Buy me as much time azh you can.”

Before Mouana cut the link, Osedax’s laughter swirled in the bridge like bonfire sparks. Then she frowned and leaned in to Wrack.  

“Time for what?” she asked, seeming genuinely intrigued despite her ludicrously high threshold for curiosity.

Wrack tilted his head over to the mess of cables still clustered around Teuthis’ pilot chair and smiled lightly.

“Time for me to have a chat with the squid, I suppose,” offered Wrack, shrugging, then froze halfway to a smirk as the ceiling blazed green.

Yes, let’s talk.

CHAPTER TWENTY

W
RACK WAS SINKING
in endless salt water.

He panicked, mouth sucking in air to scream, but only cold water filled his ruined chest. He sculled upwards with his one good arm, trying to draw the surface back, but he was sucked down ever further, the current drawing him down to empty depth.

Had he fallen in? Had the ship sunk? He looked around, but there was nothing in the void—just a halo of light, incredibly faint above, and blue fading to black in every other direction.

The sea dragged him down, and he felt pressure crush the spaces of air still inside him, wringing bubbles from dead muscle and squeezing his tired fibres together.

Down and further down, and there were no sounds beyond a far rumbling, directionless, as of icebergs shifting in the polar night. After a time, all light went from the world. He floated, unable to tell up from down, a katabatic speck.

And then stars glittered green in the dark, still at first, then swaying in sinuous chains. Points of luminescence unfurled, charting a florescence of arms into the abyss, mapping a black presence in the water ahead of him. Teuthis.

Thinking of what he was confronting, it was all too clear to Wrack that, by rights, he should be paralysed with fear. But he couldn’t really see the point—he had a favour to ask, after all, and very little to lose by doing so.